Death Foretold Duality

Criticism of Catholicism as morally stagnant and the use of Catholicism as a shield to rationalize immorality.

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez contrasts the vocal piety of the characters with the immorality of their actions in the small Colombian town of Sucre in 1951. Marquez uses metaphors and biblical allusions comparing Santiago Nasar to Jesus in order to illustrate the moral hypocrisy conflicting with the apparent self-righteousness of the Vicario twins and Angela Vicario. Marquez poses a metaphor heavily implying Nasar’s innocence while also alluding to the Bible in one scene Angela Vicario is responding to one her twin brothers who asked her the identity of the man who took her virginity.
In the case of the Vicarious twins, they couldn't get rid of Nasar's smell, "no matter how much I scrubbed with soap and rags (Marquez 78) The Vicario brothers refuse the priest's offer to confess them because they think of themselves as morally aligned with the God. While this may be the case, it still hurts the Vicario twins’ morals because they know they have violated their own principals and the guilt garnered remains. Marquez manifests their grief in the form of the sickness inducing smell lingering in their jail cell. Deep down inside, the Vicario twins understand the evil in their actions, but they use the a Catholic Church as a shield to rationalize their actions on the surface of their personalities. The Bible itself is not to blame for this type of mindset, as you can refer to the Ten Commandments established by God, the 5th commandment explicitly forbids murder. Thus, the Vicario twins rely solely on the Catholic Church whose reputation of twisting the scripture's teachings have led to such atrocities such as the Spanish Inquisition and the Indulgences (a system set up by the Catholic Church where you could buy your way into heaven). The Vicario twins actually refuse confession not because they think they're clear of guilt, rather, they think of
He also sets up characters and uses them to criticize not only as people, but their use of Catholicism to shield their immoral actions and thusly demonstrating the antiquity and immobile rules of Catholicism forcing it to hold on to outdated and possibly harmful traditions. Marquez also criticized them by setting up Nasar as a comparison to Jesus to more starkly display this disparity between the characters who think they are morally righteous when they are actually